The Virginian

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Why do liberals hate white people? The airwaves are filled with press babes and babettes telling us how bad it is if old white guys ask the sainted-must-be-believed Ford questions about her -or-uncorroborated accusation that Brett Kavanough tried to rape her 35-or-so-years-ago at a party that four other witnesses denied they attended.

Read the whole thing.

But what is the thinking behind snickering at “white men” judging an accusation of sexual assault? Chuck Grassley is a big rapist?

You can be for rape or against it -- I happen to be against it -- but the idea that alleged sexual assault survivors need the loving care of black, Indian or Hispanic men to judge their stories flies in the face of crime statistics from around the globe.

In the history of the world, there has never been a more pacific, less rapey creature than the white male of Western European descent.

I realize it gives The New York Times’ editorial board (recent acquisition: Sarah Jeong) warm feelings every time someone throws in the word “white” as an intensifier, denoting extra hatefulness, but really, guys, it’s getting old.

Can we please, for the love of God, drop the painfully trite, mind-numbing cliche about “white men,” as if somehow their whiteness makes evil even eviler?

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

So on Thursday the Senate will hear evidence of what allegedly
happened in an upstairs room at an unknown house somewhere near Columbia
Country Club, Maryland sometime in the early Eighties. Presumably Judge
Kavanaugh will be cross-examined on how close "anything close to it"
actually got. This is the pitiful state to which the United States
Senate has reduced its "advise and consent" role.

It was different nineteen years ago, when I had the misfortune,
briefly, to be living in Washington, DC - just for a few weeks while
covering the Clinton impeachment trial. I stayed at the Mayflower Hotel,
which my editors kicked up a fuss about until Monica checked in a few
doors down the corridor from me and I was the only guy on the inside.
Anyway, I wanted to check my recollections of that period, so I looked
up the moldering pile of clippings from London's Daily Telegraph, Canada's National Post
and the other papers that carried my daily trial diary. Just to set the
scene: obviously, nailing Clinton is a lot trickier than Clinton
nailing you. The general flavor of the times is caught in this January
22nd 1999 column:

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

I don't think Republicans want to hold either chamber of Congress; many Republicans prefer being like Ben Sasse, having no power whatsoever except to burble up baby-talk homilies that he can quote in fundraising letters.

Having power is scary -- you are forced to make decisions that actually have consequences, and those consequences may involve the leftwing media saying mean things about you.

So it's better to be a Controlled Opposition. They don't want actual power, which is a hard thing to have; they just want position, privilege, prestige and perks.

Since these dirtbags, sell-outs, and corporate shills prefer being in the minority, I say vote to keep them in power to spite them. Make them squirm.

The rubber is about to meet the road for Senate Republicans. They have a simple choice: they can vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, thereby ending the baseless and unsubstantiated Democrat- and media-fueled smear campaign against him, or they can kiss House and Senate majorities goodbye for the next decade, if not longer.

In case the election of one Donald J. Trump was not enough to compel the D.C. Republican establishment swamp creatures to wipe the muck from their eyes and see what's happening with their own constituents, Republican voters have had enough of feckless do-nothings whose careers consist of little more than not doing everything they promised to do.

Give us the House, the Senate, and the White House, they said, and we'll repeal Obamacare. Give us power across the major elected branches, and we’ll secure the border, they promised. With a Republican president in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, we’ll confirm the most conservative Supreme Court nominees you can imagine, they claimed.

Yet here we are. Obamacare is still on the books, and a wall is still not on the border. The only compelling reason left for Republicans to continue voting for Republicans is the confirmation of conservative jurists to fill the federal judiciary. The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was nice, but it changed nothing, as he replaced the staunchly conservative Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch's appointment merely maintained the status quo.

...

Republican lawmakers have to understand that their voters have zero patience for their excuses for not doing what they promised. It's why they elected Trump in the first place. Republican senators failed to repeal Obamacare after promising to do so for years. That was strike one. They've steadfastly refused to secure the border, let alone build a barrier along the most porous sections of the nation’s border with Mexico. That was strike two.

A refusal to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the face of a blatantly obvious Democrat smear campaign, orchestrated in concert with a compliant and obscenely partisan national media, will be strike three, and there will be no more at-bats. I have spent a career working in and covering politics, and I have never witnessed the kind of anger among rank-and-file GOP voters generated from a combination of the unsubstantiated Democrat attacks on Kavanaugh and the flaccid response of emasculated Republicans.

A lot of you are angry. You're concerned about what's going on right now, and you're worried about the future. You're disgusted by the actions of your political opponents, and you feel hope and anticipation whenever there's the slightest possibility that their goals will be thwarted. You're filled with dread when they're winning, and you're lifted into paroxysms of joyous schadenfreude when they fail.

Good news: Those feelings are all you need! If there was ever a time in American history when it was worthwhile to pay attention to facts and evidence, those days are over. Thanks to the cutting-edge technology of the early 21st century, choosing to go with your gut has never been easier or more effective. Name the outrage, and you're just a click away from the corresponding mob.

People are right to be concerned that #MeToo has gone too far. There are few who don’t think the movement has done good work in exposing predatory men and encouraging victims to come forward.

But when an editor is forced out of his job because he published something controversial, or a friend of the accused suffers professionally for his kind words, we’ve gone to the crazy place and need to come back from it.

Predatory men are all over the media and the “arts.”

It’s a place for good-looking and amoral people.

It’s part and parcel of what they sell.

It practically defines who they are.

Harvey Weinstein was able to get women to have sex with him
in return for given them movie roles.

And don’t think for a
moment that the women who gave him sex were not aware of the bargain they were
making.

He was exposed before there was a #MeToo movement.

Afterward it was a way for the women who participated to
claim the virgin-victim status.

And now it’s become the tool to destroy the men that Liberals
don’t like, even the men who maintained their virginity well into their
adulthood, like Bret Kavanaugh.

General Motors Co. and Google couldn’t be more different. GM musters an army of people and machines to produce the 10 million cars it sells each year. What Google makes doesn’t really exist: You type on a laptop or click play on a YouTube video, and Google zips back bits of digital information.

But Google parent Alphabet Inc. and the other four dominant U.S. technology companies—Apple, Amazon​.com, Microsoft, and Facebook—are fast becoming industrial giants. They spent a combined $80 billion in the last year on big-ticket physical assets, including manufacturing equipment and specialized tools for assembling iPhones and the powerful computers and undersea internet cables Facebook needs to fire up Instagram videos in a flash. Thanks to this surge in spending—up from $40 billion in 2015—they’ve joined the ranks of automakers, telephone companies, and oil drillers as the country’s biggest spenders on capital goods, items including factories, heavy equipment, and real estate that are considered long-term investments. Their combined outlay is about 10 times what GM spends annually on its plants, vehicle-assembly robots, and other materials.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Recall the last High Tech Lynching - Democrats learned nothing from the last one.

"This sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. It is a high-tech lynching."

The witnesses Kavenaugh's accuser names all deny her story.

By pussyfooting around, the Republicans have allowed a fake political-agenda driven story to drag Kavanaughs impeccable reputation through the mud. All men & women everywhere should be pissed, most especially men. This is dangerous & Ford should face a harsh punishment.

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden assailed President Trump’s supporters during a speech Saturday at the annual Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington, lamenting that “virulent people” and the “dregs of society” still had a friend in the White House...

“They’re a small percentage of the American people, virulent people,” he continued. “Some of them the dregs of society.

Taking a play from the Hillary playbook who famously called you "deplorables."

Friday, September 14, 2018

NYT just wrote a “bombshell” story on Nikki Haley’s ridiculously overpriced curtains.

The State Department spent $52,701 last year buying customized and mechanized curtains for the picture windows in Nikki R. Haley’s official residence as ambassador to the United Nations, just as the department was undergoing deep budget cuts and had frozen hiring.

Just one problem.

This happened in 2016 under the Obama administration. Trump and Haley had nothing to do with it, as was implied in the original version. It’s confounding, because NYT even acknowledged the truth in later in the post.

A spokesman for Ms. Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration. Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.

NYT was ruthlessly called out, so the editors decided to “review” the piece.

Why didn’t they review it before? That’s my question.

As it turns out, they agreed the piece was misleading and ridiculous, so they updated the post and provided this note:

Our original article was a huge crapload of #FakeNews.

HAHAHA. Just kidding. That’s what I would’ve suggested though. Here’s the real note:

An earlier version of this article and headline created an unfair impression about who was responsible for the purchase in question. While Nikki R. Haley is the current ambassador to the United Nations, the decision on leasing the ambassador’s residence and purchasing the curtains was made during the Obama administration, according to current and former officials. The article should not have focused on Ms. Haley, nor should a picture of her have been used. The article and headline have now been edited to reflect those concerns, and the picture has been removed.

It’s a problem of black racism. And until it’s taken seriously, there are no other conversations about racism worth having. When the top figures in the Democrat party are okay with anti-Semitism and racism, then their political faction and its media apparatus has no right to lecture on racism.

Sunday, September 09, 2018

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh heated up as actor Nicolas Cage began an intense line of questioning Friday: “You say you’ve studied the Constitution,” Cage said to the nominee, “so have you seen anything on it that might resemble a map, maybe pointing to the location of a hidden treasure trove?”

Cage’s line of questioning appeared to make Kavanaugh uncomfortable, as he responded with evasive answers such as, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” “That’s insane,” and “How did you get in here?”

This only seemed to incense Cage, who continued to press this line of questioning with the nominee. “There has to be something!” he asserted. “Maybe a word out of place. Or have you tried applying open flame to the Constitution to reveal a hidden message?”

“No, nothing is hidden on the Constitution,” Kavanaugh responded. “It’s all very clear.”

This enraged Cage, who started shouting and gesticulating in such an over-the-top manner that one could almost mistake him for Senator Cory Booker. “You know something!” he screamed. “You’re trying to get the treasure for the Illuminati!”

Kavanaugh looked like he was about to say something, but he turned to a menacing looking man in a bowler hat who sat behind him, who shook his head. Kavanaugh then announced, “I’m done here,” and abruptly left the hearing while Cage continued to shout at him that the treasure belonged to the American people.

It was the most confrontational questioning of the day, and one thing was clear: either Nicolas Cage was determined like no other to get the hidden treasure of James Madison or he had 2020 ambitions.

Keep Christianity Weird

The United States is now like Egypt, in that the armed forces are the only respected institution left standing. A narrow majority disapprove of the president, and steadily larger majorities are doubtful of the judiciary, despise the Congress, loathe the academy, and detest the national media. In a democracy, somebody will pay for this, and it is unlikely to be Donald John Trump, the principal accuser of the others. Woodward should never have survived as an author after inventing the deathbed confession of a comatose William Casey in his nasty novel Veil about the Iran-Contra fiasco, but this time he took one for the losing team and shot himself in the head with a howitzer. Sending him into battle to win it for the Democrats two months before the election is like dispatching a small brigade of very aged arsonists to fight one of the California summer forest fires that the new prophet of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, says was caused by this president’s opinion of climate change.

Saturday, September 08, 2018

Why is the non-ideological Donald Trump able to implement conservative principles when previous Republican presidents failed?

It occurred to me in a flash of insight that one of the
reason that Trump has successfully implemented some of the fundamental
objectives of Conservatism was because he’s faced an unprecedented amount of
hate from a broad spectrum of people.

Everyone agrees that he does not have an ideological bone
in his body.So why is he managing to
implement so many Conservative goals when, with the possible exception of
Reagan, previous Republican presidents failed to do so?Why is
he willing to back dramatic cuts in taxes for corporations, dramatically cut
the regulatory environment, and drastically expand the production and use of
fossil fuels?

Conservative theory holds that corporations don’t pay taxes;
they just pass them along to consumers so cutting corporate taxes increase
economic activity.Conservatives have campaigned
against the regulatory state for as long as I have been alive, yet the
regulatory state has grown under Democrats and Republicans. Global Warming has been exposed as Fake
Science for decades yet Republicans have gone along with the lie that it’s a threat
out of fear of being labelled science deniers.

Trump signed the largest corporate tax cut in history. Trump is slashing regulations. Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate
Accord and supports increased oil, gas and coal production.

So what gives the most reviled President the courage to
make moves that terrified his Republican predecessors?I think that Solzhenitsyn provided a clue
when he wrote (in the First Circle): “You only have power over people so long
as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of
everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.”

He was talking about prisoners.But it applies in politics as well.Politicians, more so than other people,
depend on public opinion as both a weapon and a shield.They can use favorable public opinion to advance
their agenda but are acutely conscious of public opinion being used to reduce
their power and to affect their re-election.

Previous Republican politicians did not have opponents who were seeking
to totally destroy them and their families.They were not going to leave office financial ruined.Their families were not threatened with jail,
or worse.They media and the culture
were not out to assassinate them.

In
an unprecedented way, the insane level of vitriol directed at Trump frees him caving
to the press and his political enemies.
He knows that they don’t want him to modify his policies but to overturn
the election, to destroy him and remove him from office.That leaves him free to counter-attack rather
than hunker down as previous presidents did.

He knows that the only people he has to care about satisfying is his
political base. That's what he meant when he spoke about being able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing his base.

The great economic
expansion that began with his election is either denied by his opponents or
ascribed to Obama.Whether he approves
or denies the use of coal for power plants he knows that the level of vitriol
with stay at Max levels.Whether he
increases or decreases the number of immigrants he will still be called a
racist.If he were to implement a policy
to either increase or decrease CO2 emissions his enemies would still
denounce him as a science denier.

My theory is that Trump knows that he has a rock-solid
base of support – those who got him elected primarily because they are opposed
to the “Ruling Class” (a term that covers the coalition that’s been running –
and ruining –the country).He’s also
aware that his opposition is not persuadable.They will oppose anything he does.

So he’s freed of the shackles that restrained
conventional Republican politicians who believed that they needed to do
business as usual even after getting elected on promises to make major changes.

Trump is free to use executive power,
build over generations as Congress gave the Executive more power.He has been freed of the illusion that he can
persuade the opposition.Like the
prisoner who has had everything taken away from him, he’s much more free that
those who still had that hope left.He
understands that it’s him, his base, and that part of Normal Americans who can
be shown that his ideas work.

Thanks to an insane opposition, Trump is the Conservative they never wanted and they are in danger of creating the autocrat they feared.

Why Are American Taxpayers Subsidizing Chinese Companies?

Every package from China only costs $1.50 to ship. The US Post Office charges about $14 or more. American Taxpayers make up the difference.

Jayme Smaldone, owner of Mighty Mug and featured in the video above, was also recently interviewed by Kenny Malone of NPR. Here they discuss when Smaldone discovered his mug was being counterfeited in China and shipped to American at taxpayer expense.

MALONE: A few years ago, knockoff versions of this so-called Mighty Mug started popping up all over the world. And so Jayme bought one of these.

SMALDONE: For $5.69, free shipping from China.

MALONE: Five dollars and 69 cents total, including shipping. And Jayme turns to his shipping guy and says, wait; how much would it cost us just to ship this same mug across the street?

SMALDONE: He told me it’s going to cost us about 6.30 to ship this item across the street.

MALONE: Somehow, Jayme’s foreign competitor could manufacture and deliver a mug to a U.S. address for less than he pays to just ship the mug. When he started to look into how this was possible, Jayme discovered the answer had to do with a quiet, powerful organization called the Universal Postal Union.

Mark takes on the fact that we seem to have lost the ability to explore. The last time we went to the moon was over 50 years ago. Donald Trump's announcement of an American Space Force was greeted with ridicule even as our entire economy would collapse if space became enemy territory.

Mark sums it up.

Those "Space Age" astronauts were men of boundless courage and determination: they strapped themselves in and stared not just death in the face but death in hideous and unknown ways. Yet they were also ordinary men, who were called upon to do extraordinary things and rose to the challenge. These days we are unmanned in more than merely the sense of that Luna 2 expedition. Glenn and Armstrong are gone, and their surviving comrades are old and stooped and wizened, and yet the only giants we have. Space may still be the final frontier, but today, when we talk about boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.

Thursday, September 06, 2018

The U.S. Economy today said it was embarrassed at its own impressive growth after learning — from a new Bob Woodward book and an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times — that the country is run by an impetuous idiot.

“Here I am happily growing and creating jobs,” the Economy said, “while this amoral, bozo blunders around the White House saying stupid stuff, and causing chaos for his staffers. It’s humiliating for me to succeed at this level, at a time when senior administration officials have to steal documents from the president’s desk just to maintain proper decorum.”

Reached by phone early this morning, National Security, Deregulation and Judicial Restraint sheepishly agreed with the Economy saying they feel their pleasant circumstances were purchased at the cost of turmoil for senior officials, who have to bear the unfair burden of coping with Trump’s embarrassing behavior just to make America great again.

“When we see the suffering of the anonymous resistance,” they said, “we feel guilty about thriving. After all, what do the American people want more than anything, if not a White House that runs according to historic protocol?”

Hello, America. My name is not Mike Pence. I am not the Vice President of the United States.

I work in the White House, and I'm super-important. I do awesome stuff for America every day, like secretly keeping Trump from killing us all and then writing op-eds about how grateful you should be. I want to reiterate right here that I am probably not Mike Pence.

As a White House insider, I can reveal the awful truth: Trump is a stupid stinky fart-face and nobody likes him. He really sucks. If I just let him run around the White House in his big poopy diaper doing president-type stuff all by himself, he would mess it all up and you'd hate him even more than you do now.

You want an example to prove what I'm saying? Fine. One time Trump was eating candy out of a big glass jar, this was during a really important meeting, and he was just gobbling up all this candy. Looked like almond clusters or maybe almond bark. ...

Tuesday, September 04, 2018

Radiating rapidly from campuses into the larger polity, the noble defence of an infinitely multiplying list of ‘marginalised groups’ is a predatory movement. Prowling the cultural veldt for givers of ‘offence’ is a blood sport, and its pleasures are those of hunting: spotting your prey, stalking, going in for the kill. Any source of umbrage thus presents an exulting opportunity to score a trophy, stuff it, and hang it on your (Facebook) wall. Mainstream institutions straining to be with-it give credence to this pretence of injury and vulnerability, when no one’s feelings actually have been hurt. So the victory is two-pronged. You take down the sinner, and you humiliate the editors of the Nation by forcing them to participate in an emotional theatre that every-one knows is fake.

I don’t buy into the notion that the ‘snowflake’ generation is all that sensitive, either. Antifa protestors in balaclavas can be quite violent for little specks that melt. ‘Snowflakes’ may have induced institutions to employ the language of fragility, but I think a lot of these kids are tough as old boots.

For verification, check out the YouTube video from last summer of a liberal biology professor at Evergreen State College in Washington being shouted down and physically hounded by a crowd of students crazed with virtue over a difference of opinion regarding the university’s race-related Day of Absence (‘Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Bret Weinstein has got to go!’). Behold, a pack of hyenas. Campus police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety on campus. Obliged to hold his classes 30 miles away, at length the professor was successfully forced from the faculty.

Despite youth’s reputed belief in the importance of being earnest, the whole ID politics movement is emotionally disingenuous. When during that Evergreen foofaraw a rabid convocation of students cowed the college president into lowering his arms at the podium because they found his hand gestures ‘threatening’, those students didn’t feel jeopardised; they were dominating and emasculating a man supposedly in authority. The students cowering in ‘safe spaces’ don’t feel endangered; they’re claiming territory. In protecting the faux-helpless from noxious opinions via no-platforming, they’re exercising power. The experience of exercising power isn’t scary, except on the receiving end; it’s supremely gratifying. These people aren’t frightened. They want you to be frightened of them. And we’re not talking ‘microaggression’. PC police often prefer macroaggression, the kind that can get people sacked.

Monday, September 03, 2018

Mark Steyn discussed an old Fritz Lang movies “Metropolis” a dystopian world where people are slaves to the machine and are ruled by a technocratic elite.

We’re not tied to a machine; or are we? What’s that machine in your pocket? Do you feel naked if you don't have it on you?

And those technocratic elite at Google, Facebook and Twitter control what we are allowed to see and hear. The amount of control they have over us is staggering. They amount of information they have about us, what we see, read, hear and say, where we are at any time should be terrifying. The Stazi never knew nearly as much about the people they spied on.

Under the pretense of caring for the worker, for the dispossessed, for the downtrodden, the Left is creating Fritz Lang's dystopia.

From The Undocumented Mark Steyn:

What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, "capital" no longer needs "labor"? America's liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downton Abbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool-boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor. Hence the fetishization of the "undocumented", soon to be reflected in the multi-million bipartisan amnesty for those willing to do "the jobs Americans won't do".

So what jobs will Americans get to do..?

Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry's, Howard Dean... And yet the Green Mountain State now has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well — St Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto "Very Vermont", the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you'd think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers' market. In Vermont, there's no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there's no disadvantaged minorities, because there's only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there's no nothing. Which is the real problem.

Large numbers of Vermonters have adopted the dysfunctions of the urban underclass for no reason more compelling than that there's not much else to do. Once upon a time, St Johnsbury made Fairbanks scales, but now a still handsome town is, as Norman puts it, "hollowed out by the loss of work and purpose". Their grandparents got up at four in the morning to work the farm and their great-great-great-whatever-parents slogged up the Connecticut River, cleared the land, and built homes and towns and a civilization in the wilderness. And now? A couple of months back, I sat in the café in St Johnsbury, and overheard a state bureaucrat and a Chamber of Commerce official discuss enthusiastically how the town could access some federal funds to convert an abandoned building into welfare housing...

What does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps... The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn't just be "economic inequality", but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

In an interview this week, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò challenged journalists to investigate what happened to the “cache of documents” Benedict XVI delivered to Pope Francis after his election. Some sexual abuse victims and journalists seem to have heeded the call, demanding the documents outside the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Viganò is the author of an extraordinary 11-page letter that sent shockwaves throughout Christiandom this week.

The Devil is imaginary, most people say, a myth or literary device to personify the evil in the world. Time to rethink that.

Richard Fernandez presents a plausible reason.

If anyone thought the 2016 revolt against the institutions was transient recent events may force a reconsideration. Instead of dying down open political war now permanently grips Washington. Abroad, time has healed no wounds; immigration issues have not dissipated in Europe, on the contrary riots are rocking Germany The British are still rushing bald-headed toward Brexit with all the incalculable consequences that entails. What can't be happening is.

According to sources quoted by the NYT "ideological agendas" have spread to the Catholic Church. After the Vatican's ex-ambassador to Washington Archbishop Carlo Vigano claimed a gay and left wing mafia had been protecting sex abusers within the Church and naming Pope Francis as the Left's man an issue was reliably anti-clerical suddenly turned into conspiracy story. Jason Horowitz in the NYT concluded that politics must be behind Vigano's allegations.

The letter, a bombshell written by Carlo Maria Viganò, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States and a staunch critic of the pope’s, seemed timed to do more than simply derail Francis’ uphill efforts to win back the Irish faithful, who have turned away from the church in large numbers.

Its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks amounted to an extraordinary public declaration of war against Francis’ papacy at perhaps its most vulnerable moment, intended to unseat a pope whose predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years.

Politics, as Ross Douthat notes, explains "why certain organs and apostles of liberal Catholicism are running interference for [alleged abuser] McCarrick’s protectors — because Francis is their pope, the liberalizer they yearned for all through the John Paul and Benedict years." But can "politics" or even "ideological agendas" explain why the culture wars raging raging across the world look so similar.

The humanities are ablaze. This month The New York Times reported that the Title IX office had found Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University and a superstar in literary studies, responsible for sexually harassing a former student, Nimrod Reitman, now a visiting fellow at Harvard. A lawsuit filed by Reitman fills in the details. Leading feminist and queer scholars like Judith Butler, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam have defended her — or at least deflected criticism.

I believe the allegations.

It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather.

Stories about Avital’s “process” are passed, like notes in class, from one student to the next: how she reprimanded her teaching assistants when they did not congratulate her for being invited to speak at a conference; how she requires that her students be available 24/7; how her preferred term for any graduate student who has fallen out of favor is “the skunk.”

...

This is how institutionality reproduces. Even the call to think critically about power becomes a clever smoke screen. There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean “rules I shouldn’t have to follow.” “If we focus on this one case, these details, this accuser and accused, we will miss the opportunity to think about the structural issues,” wrote Duggan. This was code. It meant, “You can talk about structural issues all you want, so long as you don’t use examples of people we know.”

You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers.

In a milquetoast take for The New Yorker, Masha Gessen applauded Duggan as a model of “academics doing their job: engaging with things in great complexity.” Of course power is messy. But there is no complexity in studying forests if you can’t recognize a tree from a few feet away. This is not wisdom; it is an eye complaint.

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.

In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.